MANTECA — Taller than any other structure for miles, four 15-story silos stood as a symbol of not just local industry, but a community.
Then, with a push of a lever on March 15, 1997, 80 years worth of history came tumbling down.
Manteca’s Spreckels Sugar Plant, one of the most iconic structures in the Central Valley, had been imploded.
The refinery stood at the southern entrance point of Manteca for almost a century, an economic and social mainstay for residents.
Old-timers will tell you that they either knew someone who worked at Spreckels or worked there themselves.
Evelyn Prouty recalls attending the silos’ destruction with her mother Muriel.
“I remember wanting to go see the Spreckels silos go down. She didn’t know where we were going and she didn’t want to miss them going down. Finally, I rounded her up in her wheelchair and we went.”
Prouty, a local historian, recalled that she was amazed by the number of people who attended the demolition. Most of those in the crowd were longtime residents of Manteca and other local towns.
“It really was the end of an era, there were so many people that were connected to it,” she said.
Muriel Prouty, a former Manteca High School teacher who died in 1999, kept saying. “Spreckels started when I started,” her daughter said, noting that, like the refinery, her mother was born in 1916.
“She never worked there, but she was connected to it,” Evelyn Prouty said. “We stayed until almost 9 p.m. and a lot of old stories were shared. It turned into a way to bring people together.”
The early years
One of the first industries to bring gold to the Golden State was sugar processing by extracting sugar from beets.
A shortage of sugar during World War I brought new demands for domestic sugar, which prompted the Salinas-based Spreckels Sugar Co. to look for a second refinery site.
The location had to have an irrigation system capable of supplying farmers with water every week or 10 days, along with proper soil and climate. That made southern San Joaquin County ideal.
The first sugar beets were exported to the area on Dec. 31, 1915, as Spreckels shipped
28,000 pounds of seed from Germany and Holland to Manteca. The first harvest yielded a high percentage of sugar — averaging about 25 tons to the acre and earning farmers $5.50 a ton.
In 1916, a dumping station, storage tanks and a tank house were built in the area to accommodate the abundance of beets. However, the freight bill to ship the beets to Salinas severely cut into profits.
That same year, local farmers circulated petitions requesting a Spreckels refinery in Manteca.
Representatives from Spreckels visited the area, first suggesting a plant be located at Mossdale or Stockton.
To attract the company, residents offered 449 acres southeast of town as a refinery site.
A $2 million facility was on the drawing board by November, and Manteca officials prepared for 300 new families.
The factory opened in 1918, with 400 employees working there by July.
After a promising beginning, the next three years were not profitable for growers. Finally, a combination of a slipping economy, declining sugar prices and insect infestations shut the Manteca plant.
Spreckels was closed from 1922 to 1931, until farmers were given new disease-resistant seeds. By 1933 the Manteca refinery was again producing commercial sugar.
The plant was a reflection of the times. When men were called to fight in World War II, many Manteca women and children worked there until the plant was closed during the latter part of the war.
The operation bounced back throughout the 1950s and the company increased its size by 25 percent in 1967. The added capacity allowed the company to house 4,200 tons of beets per day, up from 1,850 tons.
The factory was the primary producer of liquid sugar for Spreckels.
But soft drink bottlers — who were the major purchasers of the product — opted for cheaper high fructose corn syrup. Factory officials had to change their business accordingly.
During the 1980s the factory set records with increased production, efficiency and fuel economy.
Manteca’s backbone
Spreckels was the economic
backbone of Manteca, according to Prouty.
“Financially, it was huge,” Prouty said. “Farmers had the crop and then industry is needed to create the product, so A led to B. Once there is industry, it means there are local jobs, so Spreckels had a huge impact in Manteca, because if you needed a job, that was your industry.”
Old timers like 93-year-old Alberta Silva remember the effects that every beet, every rainy season and every worker had on the local economy.
Silva’s husband, Frank, worked at the refinery from 1931 to 1970 as a supervisor. She remembers the town back then. “People didn’t have to go off a long ways to go to work, they didn’t need a car,” she said.
Victor Gully, 72, a lifelong Manteca resident, recalls his father hauling sugar beets in a horsedrawn wagon down the dirt road leading to the factory.
“I never worked there, but it was neat,” he said. “It definitely had an impact on my childhood.”
Former Spreckles warehouse supervisor Mark Abram said that to show the influence Spreckels had on Manteca, employees were once paid in $2 bills. The idea was that the bills would circulate through the town.
“They showed up in every business in town,” Abram recalled. “It really showed just how many Spreckels workers lived in the town and their impact on the economy.”
Abram said he enjoyed working in Manteca because there was a sense of community that he did not have at the Los Angeles area refinery, where he worked previously.
But increasing costs for sugar beet farming in California coupled with stiff competition overseas and in the South made a sugar refinery an unfeasible economic proposition. Spreckels finally made the difficult decision to shut the Manteca refinery in 1996.
“It was sad, you know. I was hoping to stay until retirement,” said Abram, 57, who was the last employee left when the plant closed.
The process of closing the refinery was difficult, he said.
“The hardest thing was laying off all the people,” Abram said, adding that some people worked in the Manteca factory for 30, 40, even 50 years. “There were grown men crying on my shoulder. It was very sad.”
Some refinery workers found other jobs in the city, while others went to work at Holly Sugar in Tracy, which succumbed to the same economic conditions in 2002.
Most of the Manteca warehouse buildings had been demolished in the months prior to the big community gathering for the implosion.
The four silos created a mountain of concrete that was crushed and used for road base on Highway 99 when it was widened from four to six lanes between Manteca and Ripon on what developer Mike Atherton has referred to as the “sweetest stretch of freeway in California.”
An Oakland salvage company purchased iron that had been used in the building.
Bricks from the warehouse were recycled in projects around Manteca, including in front of Kelley Bros. Brewing Co, traffic islands and monument signs in the new Spreckels Park.
“Almost everything from the Spreckels refinery was recycled, even the wooden rafters were cleaned out and shipped to Idaho for use in new homes,” Abram said.
Occasionaly there are reunions with a couple of former Spreckels workers, but those are few and far between, Abram said.
“A lot of them seemed to just disappear and I haven’t seen them anymore,” he said.
Contact Paul Burgarino at (209) 832-6143 or pburgarino@angnewspapers.com.
